JUSTICE
Essential Work: China Smith and Miracle Boyd of GoodKids MadCity
Two youth organizers share their experiences with activism and trauma, and their advice for others BY ERISA APANTAKU AND ADESHINA EMMANUEL
China Smith: My name is China Smith. Miracle Boyd: This is Miracle Boyd. I live in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood. CS: I am from the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. I am eighteen.
Last Wednesday, July 15, Injustice Watch and South Side Weekly released the first in a series of first-person stories of young Black activists in Chicago. In it, two youth organizers with GoodKids MadCity—China Smith, 18, of Greater Grand Crossing and Miracle Boyd, 18, of Chicago Lawn—shared what they’ve learned and what they strive to do as organizers trying to transform the city of Chicago. On Friday, July 17, at the #DecolonizeZhigaagoong #DefundCPD Black Indigenous Solidarity Rally in Grant Park, Miracle Boyd was punched in the face by a police officer while she was filming a man getting hauled away by police. Over the weekend, a GoFundMe started to support Boyd’s healing
PHOTO BY DAVON CLARK
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raised almost $84,000, well beyond the goal of $50,000. In a Block Club Chicago article, Boyd said she plans to use a portion of the excess money to fund therapy for Black and Brown women. China Smith, talking to Injustice Watch about what happened to Boyd, said, “Black women aren’t protected enough.” In the audio piece from last week, Smith and Boyd both talked about the huge toll structural racism and the fight to end it can have on them as young Black activists. Listen to last week’s audio story from Smith and Boyd at sswk.ly/ essentialwork-GKMC, read the full transcript below, and stay tuned for more in the “Essential Work” series, a partnership between Injustice Watch and South Side Weekly.
MB: I'm eighteen years old. CS: And I am an organizer in GoodKids MadCity. MB: ...Organizer with GoodKids MadCity. CS: You know you're traumatizing yourself when regular actions and functions become triggering to you. MB: I know when I'm traumatizing myself, when I start to overthink about the situation and just constantly think about it, because then I'm reminding myself of the trauma that just happened. And I feel like as long as I think about it, it gives me a chance to
not forget about it. I'm traumatizing myself every time I relive that moment. CS: The chant, I can't breathe, for a proportion of time, it was really triggering for me. And I realized that being in these movements and constantly seeing Black death and just seeing the display of my people dying, it traumatized me. So sometimes when I hear people chant, "I can't breathe" or I see a shirt that says “I can't breathe.” I get a little triggered. One specific time, I saw a post on Facebook and there were these officers and they had shirts that said “I can breathe” and in that moment I was so outraged and hurt I started crying. And from that moment on, it was just pretty traumatic for me. Not only do we have to see this constant display of Black death, this trend of a chant from a man who actually died, but people are making mockery of it. It's trauma. MB: Activism is needed in my community for the simple fact, there are a lot of things
PHOTO COURTESY OF CHINA SMITH
¬ JULY 22, 2020
